Yahoo suffers world’s biggest hack

Yahoo has discovered a 3-year-old security breach that enabled a hacker to compromise more than 1 billion user accounts, making it the biggest security breach in history. The digital heist disclosed Wednesday occurred in August 2013. Yahoo said it hasn’t been able to identify the source behind the 2013 intrusion. The stolen information included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and security questions and answers. The company says it believes bank-account information and payment-card data were not affected. The hackers also apparently stole passwords. Technically, those passwords should be secure; Yahoo said they were scrambled twice — once by encryption and once by another technique called hashing. But hackers have become adept at cracking secured passwords by assembling huge dictionaries of similarly scrambled phrases and matching them against stolen password databases. That could mean trouble for any users who reused their Yahoo password for other online accounts. Yahoo is requiring users to change their passwords and invalidating security questions so they can’t be used to hack into accounts. Security experts said the 2013 attack was likely the work of a foreign government fishing for information about specific people.

In Other News The toll of the wildfires that ravaged Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in recent weeks is staggering: 14 people dead, another 175 injured, and more than 2,400 houses, businesses and other structures destroyed. The local county estimates the damage to be more than $500 million. The federal government says nearly 20,000 acres of Great Smoky Mountains National Park have been scorched. The two Tennessee youths held for being responsible are sitting in a detention center. If convicted of aggravated arson, they could go to prison for 60 years. If more serious charges, including first-degree murder, are levied against them and they are convicted, they could spend the rest of their lives in prison. They remain unnamed publicly because of their age. Among the unknowns is whether prosecutors will charge them as adults. Two boys were building a fort and were trapped after a snow bank collapsed on them. The boys had crawled inside the snow bank to build the fort. Police in Greenwich, New York, said Joshua Demarest, 13, died Tuesday night in the collapse. His 12-year-old friend survived and is recovering from hypothermia. The pair were reported missing when they didn't return home at nightfall. The cause of the accident is under investigation, but police believe a public works crew may have dumped more snow on the structure, causing the collapse. Snow plows work the area where the boys were playing and dump cleared sidewalk snow at the location. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte announced on Instagram on Wednesday that his fiancée, Kayla Rae Reid, is pregnant with their first child.